Hannah Perfecto discovered her passion for psychology and consumer behavior when she was an undergrad at Yale University. “It was the time when a lot of these pop psychology books, like Freakonomics or Nudge, that were using data to answer questions about how people are behaving on a large scale, were coming out,” says Perfecto.
Fortunately, faculty at Yale’s School of Management were conducting research on the intersection of consumer psychology and marketing—a topic she found fascinating.
“I worked in that lab for basically my whole time there,” says Perfecto. “When I realized that I could keep doing that as a graduate student and then subsequently as a professor, I jumped at the opportunity.”
Her graduate studies would take her to West Coast, where she earned her MS and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and to Olin, where she continues to research judgment and decision making. Specifically, Perfecto says she looks at how marketers can make small changes to how a decision is phrased or how outcomes are described.
“Even with these small changes, we can see sometimes dramatic changes in how people make those decisions or feel about those outcomes,” she says.
Get to know Hannah Perfecto, assistant professor of marketing, in the video above.
Research Interests:
Consumer behavior, behavioral decision theory, meta-cognition, field experiments, research replicability and reliability
Selected Publications:
- “Rejecting a Bad Option Feels like Choosing a Good One”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Issue 5, 659-670, with J. Galak, J.P. Simmons, and L.D. Nelson, 2017
Awards/Honors:
- Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, 2016
- AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow, American Marketing Association, 2016
- Diversity Travel Scholarship, Society of Consumer Psychology, 2016
